


Do Not Go Gently

by elrhiarhodan



Category: White Collar
Genre: Collection: Purimgifts Day 3, Gen, Season/Series 04 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-21
Updated: 2013-02-21
Packaged: 2017-12-03 03:44:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/693726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elrhiarhodan/pseuds/elrhiarhodan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Forced by the powers that be into doing something he didn’t want, Reese Hughes is no one’s passive victim.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Do Not Go Gently

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tigerbright](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigerbright/gifts).



Reese may have told Peter that the brass had threatened his pension, that they’d take away his retirement benefits if he didn’t step down. That wasn’t a lie, not really. The directors may have made some noise about cutting off his government funded healthcare, but they couldn’t take away his pension without serious legal effort. Hell, even that idiot Fowler kept his, and he committed murder.

No, it wasn’t the brass that made him leave; it was finding the photographs of his wife, his daughters, his grandchildren, in his car. The images were unmolested, but they were clipped to a set of contracts for burial plots. There was a copy of the one that he and his wife, Miriam, had signed a few years ago, and a new one for an adjacent plot with enough space for all of his children, their spouses and their children. There was also an estimate for headstones for everyone except him.

The threat was cruel, unsubtle, and effective. _Resign or everyone you love will die._

Pratt was a man who understood power, how to get it, how to use it, how to keep it. One didn’t rise from beat cop to precinct captain to chief of police, all the way to United States Senate otherwise. On the surface, he was just the kind of politician one didn’t see too much of anymore – socially mindful without the extremist views that made politics such a dirty word these days. His constituents admired him because he stayed above the fray.

But Hughes knew just how dirty he was – he saw the files that Peter put together before Pratt tried to kill him. It wasn’t just campaign finance, though. He’d done his own digging and maybe he wasn’t as discreet as he could have been. He found where some of the bodies were buried, and he wasn’t being metaphorical. The mob had the marshes off the Meadowlands, the senator had a toxic waste dump. Although his ownership was hidden by a dozen different holding companies, Pratte owned a Superfund site on the western shore of Maryland. A few years ago, after a big storm, a pair of unidentifiable skeleton were discovered there. Someone had smashed in their faces to destroy the teeth – hopefully after blowing a hole in the back of their heads.

This was Pratt’s doing. Hughes was sure of it, even though there was no way to prove anything other than the tenuous link between the senator and some anonymous corporations. There was nothing else, other than his gut telling him that this man was evil.

It was pretty obvious what was going to happen if he pursued this. His life would mean nothing if his family was annihilated. Retirement was the best option. The only option.

But he was not going to go quietly into the night. Nearly forty years with the Bureau meant he had friends who did the kind of work that stayed out of official reports. He also had friends who liked to scrape away at the layers and get to the truth, too. It wasn’t going to be easy, it wasn’t going to be safe, and he might just end up in a plain pine box made without nails and someone saying the Mourner’s Kaddish for him. 

But if he went like that, he wasn’t going to go alone.

__

FIN


End file.
